Yesterday it was 7:00pm and we still were not done with online school.
I refuse to call it homeschool because we are in no way, shape or form homeschooling here. That would imply I am doing the work of an educator.
I do zero lesson planning or assessing or any of the actual work of teaching. I have only one job actually.
I am just the student wrangler.
And it turns out I can wrangle students in the classroom like nobody’s business, but at home, all the nopes.
I had 56 students in the same room with me and my teaching partner my last year in the classroom and we rocked it.
5 kids in my house trying to do lessons someone else planned and I have to do zero work for? All the failure.
I’ve gotten emails and phone calls from my kids’ wonderful teachers telling me of missed online meetings and assignments not yet done. They want to help but the divide we are all facing is just too great for them to help in the way they so desperately want to.
All I can say is…yup. I know. I’m worried too.
I want to follow up with “I’m on it.” but we would all know that was a lie.
I am not on it.
I started working with my youngest this morning at 10:00 am and by 11:00 with only one class done I sent him from the room to play LEGOS and just be off my person so I could finish my own workday.
When I finished my work I couldn’t even drum up the energy I needed to help him move forward so instead I ate some chips and played a little Hay Day and tried to stay really, really quiet so he would think I was still working and wouldn’t come find me to start working on school again.
I’m so not on it.
We are lucky to have one self-starter who is good at deadlines here and that person is gold. They are like the magic baby that you bring home from the hospital and just sleeps through the night.
The rest of these people are not like that baby. Not one bit.
And yet there is no reason for anything they are not doing well right now to define them. They are amazing and loved humans that aren’t adjusting to online learning.
Let’s focus on the amazing and the loved.
If you’re with me please know it’s OK that we don’t know what we are doing…there is no way we or our kids should know what we are doing.
I heard an educator today call this “crisis schooling” and I thought this was the perfect way to say it.
